Hearth Cooking

How does a wood-fired hearth work?

When cooking with a live fire, your oven cooks simultaneously in three ways.

Reflected heat

Convection

Conductive heat

Flame from a live fire is bounced off
the dome onto your food. This reflective heat cooks food,
such as pizza, and also recharges the cooking floor,
putting heat back into the floor to replace heat that is lost
through cooking.
Because your oven breathes, drawing in cold
air through the lower half of the oven opening and
exhausting hot air out the top half of the opening, it is
constantly moving hot, moist air across the top of your
food. While modern convection ovens use fans and heat
coils to move hot, dry air within the oven, nothing can
compare with natural convection.
Finally, heat stored in the cooking floor is transferred
directly into food that is set on top of it. This is true for
bread and pizza, which are set directly on the cooking
floor, and for pots and pans set on it.
It is this unique cooking ability that let's you make Italian
pizza, hearth bread and great roasts in your wood-fired
oven, and what makes wood-fired cooking unlike any
other type of cooking.

Retained Heat Cooking:

For baking bread and other dishes at temperatures where
you would normally cook in a conventional oven, your
oven will cook for hours with retained heat. You should
rake out the coals from the fire, and then close the oven
door to let the oven temperature moderate.
With this type of cooking, you can bake bread, desserts
and small roasts, and as the oven temperature falls, you
can slow cook beans, soups and stews, and long-cooking
meats and ribs.